In honor of Day of Silence on Friday (today if you’re Tufts and ur doin it wrong), in which the gays give it a rest already and shut up for just one hot second, here’s a totally scientific study I did about why it seems like all of your friends are gay when you go on Facebook and check out your newsfeed.  Turns out, the gays really like to use Facebook.  Maybe Facebook activity should be included in Day of Silence activities.

The new Facebook layout makes it pretty easy to collect data about groups of people. All I did was make a friends list called “Gays”, put all my friends that I know are LGBT in it (confirmed only), and then did some pretty easy number crunching.

My friend breakdown:

So yeah, I have a ton of friends.  It’s a big group of people, and clearly includes a large amount of people that I don’t interact with on a regular basis or have met just once or twice, as any Facebook friends list does. 

Before I looked at who did what, I looked at who did anything. 

Here’s the data in graphical form:

Almost 60% of my gay friends updated their status at least once in the past 7 days, compared to 31% of my straight friends.  A third of my gay friends made an alteration to their profile at least once in the past 7 days compared to about 1 in 5 of my straight friends. So as you can see, more gays use Facebook more frequently than straighties.

Then I went through every item in my newsfeed from the past 10 days.  It looks like this:

“Other App” is overwhelmingly those wicked annoying quizzes.  Everyone needs to stop doing those. 

Also, Facebook puts up multiple items when you post a new photo album, so each photo data point is one new photo album and does not include “blank was tagged in x”.

I considered each chunk of links shared on Google Reader or other RSS aggregator to be one data point.

I then used these data to compute a Gayness Ratio for each class, which is a measure of gay overrepresentation.  This value is the percent of items that were gay divided by the percentage of my friends that are gay.  So for Status Updates, the value is 2.58, because [24.5% of the status updates in my newsfeed were gay] divided by [9.5% of my friends are gay].  It basically means that the average status update is 2.58 times gayer than it should be if everyone updated their status equally.

Here’s all the things that you can do on Facebook with their Gayness Ratio from gayest to least gay:

Sharing a link is the gayest thing you can do on Facebook, while posting a photo is the straightest.  I expected “Other App” to be number one since those quizzes are so damn gay, but that was not the case.

My gut hypothesis about why gays are so happy posting to Facebook?  The coming out process necessitates that gay people share very intimate details about their life with a large amount of people, desensitizing (or enabling, depending on your interpretation) us to sharing other things easily too.  Relatedly, I also wouldn’t be surprised if it puts us a little higher on the narcissism scale either.

I don’t have a Twitter account, but I’m pretty sure you’d find very similar results.  In fact, I would expect the results to be more striking, because doing a quick guesstimation off the top of my head, I’d say that 80% of the people that I know that use Twitter are gay. 

Additionally, after combing through over 2000 newsfeed items, I can almost assure you this same data for straight bitties to straight quaids promises to be ridiculous.  Bitties be updating for real.